Today in TV History: ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Ended Its Second Season with a Dead Denny

Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.

IMPORTANT DATE IN TV HISTORY: May 15, 2006

PROGRAM ORIGINALLY AIRED ON THIS DATE: Grey’s Anatomy, “Deterioration of the Fight or Flight Response” / “Losing My Religion” (Season 2, Episodes 26/27) [Stream on Netflix]

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: That Grey’s Anatomy premiered on ABC in the same season that Lost and Desperate Housewives did sometimes gets lost, because Grey’s premiered at mid-season. And late mid-season at that. Airing only 9 episodes before the end of season 1, Grey’s Anatomy didn’t really have time to become an addictive ratings sensation. That came in season 2.

The second season of Grey’s Anatomy did everything a smart primetime soap should. It cranked up the intrigue on its central romantic drama, adding Kate Walsh to the cast as McDreamy’s wife. Set half of its cast up to be hopelessly in love with the other half. Its medical cases got more fraught and high-pressure. This was the season with the celebrated post-Super Bowl episode, with Christina Ricci and Kyle Chandler and an explosive device inside a patient. It was also the season that introduced Denny Duquette as a patient in need of a heart transplant. As played by current TV mainstay Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Denny was a sweetheart of a patient. One of those gregarious sorts who gives his doctors a hard time with a sparkle in his eye. He was a character tailor made for Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl) to fall in love with.

Depending on your perspective, Denny was the best thing to ever happen to Izzie on the show or else the worst. Similarly, the events of the season 2 two-part finale are either Grey’s Anatomy at its best or its most frustrating. (Of course some, like yours truly, might say both.) Grey’s always walked that tightrope between utter exasperation at its central characters, doctors who refused to stop being led around by their idiot hearts. The show always put on a good face about showing the consequences to these actions and the responsible doctors who stuck up for the responsible course of action. But time and again, Shonda Rhimes came down on the side of crazy, stupid love, and whatever it took to arrive at it. Obviously, Izzie was going to cut Denny’s LVAD wire, sending him into critical heart failure, all so he could move up to the top of the transplant list. A risky, insane gambit that in any real-world setting would have cost her her medical license and probably put her in jail. On Grey’s, though, that all only almost happens. But that would come the following season. For now, Izzy cuts the wire, Denny gets his heart transplant, and while Izzie might get fired, she at least will end up with the love of her life. Right?

Denny’s death was the kind of icy stab to the heart that would become/had already become a Grey’s Anatomy hallmark: the possibility of ultimate happiness followed swiftly by total disaster, scored by a Snow Patrol song that just by virtue of its presence here became a hit. That it came in the middle of a hospital-wide “prom” thrown to cheer up a cancer patient (guest star Tessa Thompson) makes it perhaps the most Grey’s moment of all. Adolescent notions of love butting up against the cruel mercilessness of nature.